On cattleherds' knowledge and cattle foraging

I'm sorry about the slow pace of adding posts here. It's not due to lack of enthusiasm! Today I want to finally write something about this paper, which has been on my mind for a while and which I happened to mention in a talk I gave the other day:

Molnár, Z., Kelemen, A., Kun, R., Máté, J., Sáfián, L., Provenza, F., ... & Vadász, C. (2020). Knowledge co‐production with traditional herders on cattle grazing behaviour for better management of species‐rich grasslands. Journal of Applied Ecology, 57(9), 1677-1687.

It's open access:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1365-2664.13664?casa_token=5oUyv8fBedMAAAAA:1tw32duaEKidYGaQssHYgwb38g5JRoMNaMUwjlljWU2kS3lDiVh8-yOirdShrjm1q9rt6JaLV9nc1g

In this paper, Molnár and ecology and conservation colleagues, along with two co-authors who are listed as traditional cattle herders, characterise the complex feeding behaviour of extensively grazed and actively herded cattle in Hungary. Based on a number of herders' testimonies, they derive what is basically an ethnobiological ethogram, which describes 10 different eating behaviours of cattle. Although cattle are usually described as non-selective foragers, it is clear from this ethogram that they are (or can be) highly selective. The behaviours range from running towards a plant they want to eat, to letting a plant they started eating fall out of their mouth. Molnár himself (impressive since established professors often give up on fieldwork) spent around a month observing individual cattle and attributing these ten behaviours to each of their bites, along with what plant species was being eaten (or rejected). The resulting dataset has over 30,000 behaviours registered, each associated to a plant species. This is also quite impressive, not only for the size of the dataset, but for its quality.

The paper then shows an analysis of the ranking of over one hundred species found in the pastures, according to how often different behaviours of eating (with more or less enthusiasm) or avoiding (more or less actively) were expressed towards each species. This is very interesting because we are used to being told that plants are either palatable or unpalatable. Many species that were frequently avoided were also more rarely "picked from", that is, a particular structure such as the flower was eaten but not the whole plant. A number of species that were frequently avoided were also frequently eaten mixed with other species, or even sometimes completely consumed when found alone. This certainly seems to be in line with the literature about how cattle learn to mix palatable and unpalatable species in rangeland management, which Provenza and colleagues have written about a great deal. It would seem that this subtle view of palatability and foraging preferences, reflecting preference diversity either between individuals, or depending on the internal states of cattle at different times, ought to complicate our understanding of herbivore-plant interactions. For example, if a plant is usually avoided alone but more likely to be eaten in combination with other plants, should such plants evolve to disperse and grow in monospecific patches? Do different grazing species have similar preferences?

The second part of the paper where Molnár et al. describe how herders influence cattle preferences and foraging patterns through herding-- by making them stay longer or move faster through particular areas-- is also extremely interesting. It illustrates a number of fascinating phenomena: the context-dependency of choice and how this can be manipulated in real time; interspecies influences over behaviours; and how small-scale practices and detailed interpretation of animal behaviour contribute to maintaining a landscape and its plant diversity.

According to the herders, active herding by them is necessary to maintain the quality of the pastures and make a living from herding. There are two different ways this could be interpreted. The negative and narrow interpretation would be that cattle, when left to their own devices, degrade pastures and are somehow inherently and naturally destructive. Although many studies demonstrate cases in which cattle have negative impacts on some elements of particular habitats, and at a global scale cattle farming is generally thought to be bad for the environment (an assessment which does not distinguish pastoralism from industrial feedlot production), I think there is a more subtle and more ecologically-informed interpretation of what cattle do when left alone vs. when herded. I would guess that cattle when left alone forage differently but also move around the landscape differently, perhaps at different scales, in different size groups, or with different timing; this will also depend on things like the distribution of habitat types available, the presence of predators, and so on. The particular constraints and configurations of pastures in Hungary must have been developed through a long history of cattle herding in the region. Therefore to maintain the best pasture conditions possible within these configurations and constraints, the same patterns of guided movement need to be maintained. Herding creates a system that depends on herding to stay the same. The landscape is formed through joint action and joint thinking. It is not made only by cattle or only by herders, but by their joint practices. The symbiosis has its own ecological impacts.

These reflections suggest many questions to explore and hypotheses to develop, such as whether non-herded extensively grazed cattle would show the same set of grazing behaviours and the same distribution of mixed preferences for plants, and whether they modulate their foraging behaviour in other ways, for example by relying more on social cues, cues from other grazing species (if present) or by ranging more widely or otherwise using space differently to avoid negative impacts of over-grazing certain patches.

I am also curious to what extent horses, sheep, goats, and wild grazers and browsers do the same, and how mixed flocks behave.

One thing I really love about this paper, in addition to the rich and suggestive data it presents, is its integration of local knowledges into the design of the research itself. Here, local knowledge is not simply catalogued as a set of facts, or converted into a dataset for statistical analysis. There is nothing wrong with doing either of those things, of course, but they use only a small part of the potential of indigenous and local knowledges, by reducing it down into the aspect that makes good data. A richer appreciation of indigenous and local knowledges beyond its reduction into data is possible. This paper is a good example. Local knowledge is used as a conceptual and theoretical framework to help create observational and analytical categories for application within a scientific sampling method . This is very cutting-edge in terms of developing methods that cross and merge practices, epistemologies, cultures, or ontologies. It is also a great inspiration and model for how to collaborate with local non-scientists to develop advance science, and hopefully reveal new observations or, new arguments, or new opportunities to the local people themselves.

Photo (c) me. Cattle herders in Lesotho, 2019. I am not sure whether cattle herders in Lesotho have the same kind of knowledge or herd in the same way since many of them were adolescents and mainly seemed to view herding as a hardship rather than a profession or a craft; this would be interesting to understand better. Land in Lesotho is also all commons and has almost no fences, which may also affect the relative importance herders give to herding in particular patterns within specific spatiotemporal bounds. The prevailing view seemed to be that herders herded badly, but like many such views held by conservationists and international consultants, may be quite wrong. We talked to a few herders about rangeland degradation but did not go into the kind of detailed issues described in the Molnár et al. paper.